The How-To of Workplace Surveys (Part 1)

YOU’VE DECIDED TO DO A WORKPLACE SURVEY

What are you hoping to achieve?

Measuring employee satisfaction by conducting a workplace survey allows you to look at a range of performance and engagement drivers, such as pay and other ways people are rewarded and recognised, as well as how people feel about their jobs, their managers, teams and how connected they feel to the organisation as a whole.

The reasoning behind eliciting employee’s feedback about their experience at work is based on the premise that the happier and more engaged employees are, the more efficient and productive they are, which has positive flow-on effects to customer satisfaction and the overall success and profitability of the business.

You may not be asking the exact same questions as other companies conducting workplace surveys, so you may not be able to draw the same comparisons as you would if you were comparing ‘apples with apples’, however conducting a workplace survey is still an extremely valuable exercise. The data that you collect in ‘year 1’ becomes your benchmark against which to compare future satisfaction survey results so that trends can be tracked over time within your business.

What to ask – and how

RATING SCALE

We recommend that employees are asked to rate several statements under each of the below groupings according to a five point “Strongly Agree – Strongly Disagree” scale.

QUESTION GROUPINGS

As is commonplace in the world of workplace surveys, our own survey specifically groups questions under the below areas that cover off the aspects of an employee’s experience working for an organisation. In addition to these groupings, we recommend asking some broad ‘overall’ questions (see ‘engagement statements’ below) as well as several qualitative questions (that encourage free-text answers / comments) that can be analysed to provide context around the ratings.

VISION & VALUES / STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT

COMMUNICATION & COLLABORATION

SENSE OF COMMUNITY / BELONGING

COMPANY LEADERSHIP

MY JOB / EMPOWERMENT / AUTONOMY

MY MANAGER / MANAGEMENT SUPPORT

MANAGING PERFORMANCE / FEEDBACK

REWARD & RECOGNITION / PAY & BENEFITS

MY WORK ENVIRONMENT / RESOURCES / HEALTH & SAFETY

TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT / CAREER PROGRESSION

While all the questions within your survey will provide an indication of how satisfied an employee is with a particular aspect of one the above areas, certain questions have been determined to play a larger part in contributing to an employee’s overall sense of “engagement”.

MUST-ASK QUESTIONS THAT HAVE THE BIGGEST BARING ON “ENGAGEMENT”

We’d highly recommend asking this ‘engagement question’ asked by many companies to determine whether or not people are satisfied in their jobs, and would suggest that this is possibly the most important question of the entire survey:

How strongly would you agree or disagree with this statement:

“I WOULD RECOMMEND THIS COMPANY AS A GREAT PLACE TO WORK TO MY FRIENDS”

Other must-have statements (or similar variations of these) include:

“I feel proud to tell people where I work”

“This organisation motivates me to go above and beyond in my work”

“I see myself working in this organisation in two years’ time”

How long is the ideal survey?

While there’s no ‘ideal’ length of a workplace survey, as a general rule, we’d recommend asking between 65-70 questions in total. Ask yourself this question when deciding what to keep in and what to ‘cull’: “Does this question tell us something useful that we could potentially act on? Or is it a nice-to-know?”.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the How-To of Workplace Surveys – coming soon!

In the meantime, if you have any queries on running your next Workplace Survey, contact one of our People and Culture experts today.

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